Observations, reviews and interviews of Dom Romeo, Professional Nerd

“Like a lot of British, I came here
backpacking,” Rhys Jones explains. “After seven months I’d run out of money and
got stuck in Sydney, and just kind of gave comedy a go.”

I’d like to tell you that stand-up comic
Rhys Jones – who hails from Portsmouth, England – is an interesting guy; that
he’s an amazing comic; that he’s a close personal friend and it’s been a real
pleasure getting to know him; but I won’t. Because no matter how true all of it
is, I’m only just getting to know Rhys and I have a certain amount of jealousy
that this guy can just pop up out of nowhere and be running a popular open mic
room.

Okay, sure, he has been doing comedy for a
few years now – paid his dues and all that – and he himself admits that he’s
only really started to pick up momentum “over the last six months or so”, but
this is also the guy who’ll occasionally give notice for failing to make a gig
because he’s landed another, MCing for strippers. When has your excuse for
‘piking’ ever been so good?

Meanwhile, his room, ‘Stand Up, Get Down’
at the World Bar on Bayswater Road, Darlinghurst, has gone from being
fortnightly to weekly. And Rhys is helping program comedy for festivals like
the up-coming Playground Weekender. So, no matter how good, nice, talented,
decent he is, or how hard he’s worked to be as successful as he is, I have to
hate him just a little bit on principle. How dare he be that cool, that good,
that essential to the growing comedy scene, seemingly out of nowhere?

Long Time Being

“I’ve been here five years,” Rhys explains when we finally catch up for a chat – ostensibly to promote the Playground
Weekender festival. Despite being broke and stranded seven months into his
visit to Australia, now he is not so broke, and not quite stranded. Rather, he
says, he’s “kind of trapped” – but in a good way: “owning things” now prevents
him from heading home. Acquiring ‘big things’ like a sofa, accumulating a life,
a career, and friends, he is essentially planting roots over here. “I like it,”
he says – and it must be liking him back. Friends are certainly harder to
offload on www.gumtree.com.au than the sofa, so why not stay! Especially when
it was “a dear friend” that finally encouraged Rhys to take a stab at stand-up
comedy.

“I was kind of‘press-ganged’ into it,” he insists. “She suggested it when
I’d come up with a particularly witty quip at a dinner party. I kind of just
tossed the suggestion aside offhand. I blame her, basically.” Being the “dear
friend” that she is, Rhys's buddy entered him into the Melbourne International Comedy
Festival/Triple J Raw Comedy competition. Which is a good thing. Because
despite growing up a “huge student of comedy” in England, where humour was
essentially “embedded” into him from an early age via sitcoms like “Black Adder, Only Fools And Horses and the rest of it”, he probably wouldn’t
have gotten around to giving it ago himself. Sure, Portsmouth was a big enough
place to afford a lot of live comedy – with their own Jongleurs (part of a
UK-wide chain of venues) and “major acts” like Harry Hill and Steve Coogan
passing through to play the Guildhall as part of a national tour, and even a
fortnightly comedy room at the Wintergreen – but there was no open mic scene to
speak of. So even though, Rhys says, comedy was something that he’d thought
about doing, something that he’d “almost fantasised about”, where was he going
to take the stage in order to learn the art?

Well, of course, there is London…

“To be honest, I found London quite a daunting prospect.”
Rhys admits. “Sydney, as a city, is a really good middle ground, because it’s a
cosmopolitan city, but it’s not quite as harsh and as massive as London.” It’s
also “by the sea”, like his home town. So Sydney offers the best aspects of
London and Portsmouth with an easier entre – if you’re willing to take it –
into comedy. “Since I’ve tried stand-up in Sydney, and done it elsewhere in
Australia, I think Australia’s a great place to ‘learn the trade’, as it were.
Particularly in Sydney: most of the audiences are pretty attentive and have a ‘good
on the newcomer’ attitude. I don’t think I’d be involved in comedy in the UK –
I’d be the funny guy at the pub getting drunk every weekend. Now I’m a guy
doing comedy and getting drunk every weekend. And occasionally during the
week.”

Rhys
in the Raw

One point I am having trouble with is that
Rhys Jones was a Raw Comedy contestant in Sydney – having judged pretty much
all the Sydney heats for the last I-don’t-know-how-many years, I must have
judged Rhys’s. How come I wasn’t aware of him until he was doing well enough
for me to be jealous of his success? According to Rhys, his two attempts “ended
in a bit of a disaster” – as far as early attempts at amateur comedy go. “The
first one was the first ever time I did comedy, and I lost my train of thought.
The second one, I forgot the last two minutes of my routine. After a promising
start, I just walked off.”

I’m kind of relieved – I’d hate to have
failed to spot a genuine talent. And, better still, it proves my strongest held
tenets about comedy and competitions: the point of doing comedy is to make the
audience laugh, not to win competitions. And the point of doing comedy
competitions is to make the audience laugh, not to win competitions. Some of
the finest talent you will ever be amused by, failed to win competitions – the
comedians who make it are the ones who keep getting back up on stage. And the
ones who start running their own venues so that they can keep getting back up
have a better chance of that. Rhys agrees. “The only way you learn is through
those bad gigs. I think I’ve come along a lot.”

Too true. In fact, you learn a lot more
from a so-called ‘bad gig’ than you do from walking away from a ‘good’ one. In
fact, in my limited experience, it’s easy to walk away from a successful
performance a little bit proud and cocky, and then totally stuffing up the next
one as a result! Again, Rhys concurs: “I think the key to getting anywhere in
comedy – and I’m still just starting out –is building a thick enough skin to deal
with the low blows.”

Which leads to the other golden rule of
stand-up comedy: no comic has ever done their best or worst gig. There’s always
going to be one down the track that could set the new benchmark! That’s just as
true – possibly more so – when running the room. Again, Rhys knows this only too
well. “You really get an insight how tough it is marketing comedy to people,” he
says of his experience with ‘Stand Up, Get Down’. “There’s been a bit of an
explosion with venues in Sydney in the last year. Some of them are doing better
than others. Ours is going steady. We’ve got a particular niche… We do try and
promote the little guy, to a certain extent. I’m all a bout giving headline and
MC spots to guys who are up-and-coming who perhaps wouldn’t get on in a similar
capacity at other venues.”

Clearly, I’d suggest, Rhys must be getting
right, seeing as ‘Stand Up, Get Down’ has gone from a fortnightly room to a
weekly one.

“Yeah, we changed that in December, the
reason being that it was impossible for people to keep track of what weeks we
were on. The idea to go weekly is just so people know every Wednesday there’s
comedy at the World Bar, instead of having to faff around trying to work out
which week the night falls on.”

We?

“The weekly comedy room at the World Bar is
attached to a night called ‘The Wall’, run by my business partner Dan Chin.
Every week he has a different artist exhibiting upstairs and we run the comedy
out of that room. ‘Stand Up, Get Down’ is also known as ‘Comedy At The Wall’
because it’s affiliated with this art space night.”

Oh, okay. So Rhys Jones in a nutshell: came
to Australia to realise the lifetime of comedy embedded into him, hitherto only
fantasised about, and contributes significantly to the local stand-up scene.
But there’s more: in the process he also starts helping establish some of the
cooler aspects of the UK comedy scene Downunder. The Playground Weekender
festival, now in its fourth year, is the prime example of that.

Playground
Weekender

“Playground Weekender is a festival started
by English expats,” Rhys explains. “They started up Good Vibrations a few years
ago before selling it on. The whole ethos is a British-style festival, so it
has a lot more of a laid-back aesthetic than, say, your Big Day Outs or your
other music events; the whole ethos is fun. I’ve been to every one and seen it
grow, which has been great.”

From barely 2000 attendees that first year
(still a significant start, of course), the Playground Weekender festival had
quadrupled in size by its third year: 8000 people. This year they’re expecting
12,000. Not only that: this year there’ll be comedy. Using the British model,
where every festival has a comedy venue, Playground Weekender is offering two
hours of comedy on each of the festival’s four nights, in ‘The Shack’.

“Dan and I are both extremely chuffed that
they’ve asked us to host the comedy stage. We’ve got one of the main stages to
run. It’s a beautiful setting as well: the Del Rio resort at Wisemans Ferry, on
the Hawkesbury River. It’s just a really laid- back ‘anything goes’ attitude,
really. Like any music festival, it’s what you make of it. You can go for the
quiet time, or you can go crazy.”

Furthermore, there are live art
installations that culminate with a charity auction at the end of the festival,
hosted by Rhys. “We did that a few years ago and it was a huge success,” he
says. I’m impressed. More so, when I ask Rhys if he was instrumental in
ensuring comedy become a part of the festival. “All the legwork was done by
Dan,” he says. “I’m just clinging onto his coattails and sorting out some
comics and getting the word out, I guess.”

Talented, successful and humble. Rhys, I
really want to like you, but you make it so difficult… And it gets worse:

“Our grand vision is to introduce this
format to other weekend festivals around Australia. In Britain it’s a given:
there’s always a comedy tent in every festival you go to, which generally runs
all day, every day.If we could
introduce a scaled-down version, and perhaps, further down the line, have the
financial backing to get some really big names out, It could be something we
take around Australia with us.”

Um… Rhys, mate, I’m just wondering… is
there any more room on those coattails?

Details

Playground Weekender runs for a four-day
weekend at Wisemans Ferry, from Thurs 18 Feb to Sun 21 Feb. A four-day ticket
is $219. A three-day ticket is $199 (plus booking fees). There are day tickets
available as well.

More importantly, here are the comedians
appearing – in Rhys’s words, “our favourite performers of 2009:

Eric Hutton – Stand Up, Get Down’s favourite
headliner and a highly original
funny man. The Voice of Barry White with the delivery of a highly accurate
postman [I’d say he’s the illegitimate product of an illicit tryst between The
Chaser’s Charles Firth and Andrew Hansen, but whatever – Dom], this strawberry
blond dynamo is a truly originally comic / the best freestyle rapper in town! http://erichuttontime.com/

Nick Sun – Fresh from a tour of the States
supporting Doug Stanhope, and on the verge of a fourth show at the Melbourne
International Comedy festival, Nick is a unique comedian who eschews the
artificiality of traditional stand up for a more insightful, honest and god
damn, sharp as a knife hilarious brand of comedy… http://www.nicksun.com/pages/multimedia.php

Shane Matheson – Highly unconventional,
brilliantly inventive and always hilarious, Shane is about to venture to
Melbourne International Comedy Festival for his third festival show. Superb
improviser and great “randomist”, Shane combines the fearlessness of Sam
Simmons, with the characterisation of those British legends Vic Reeves and Bob
Mortimer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu-oOGmbJho

Ryan Withers – Natural born funny man,
armed with a rapier wit and rather girlish looks, Ryan Withers aka DJ Randy
Winters, is a regular performer, and organisational contributor at Stand Up Get
Down. About to burst forth at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival with
his first solo show, Ryan has supported the likes of Arj Barker and Jamie
Kilstien here in Sydney. 2009 was a massive year, but it looks like 2010 is
truly going to be where this young Maestro really hits his stride. For an
insight into the truly unique mind of Ryan Withers read this recent column
where he interviews himself, wow, crazy fun!http://www.throwshapes.com.au/2009/12/17/comedy-gatecrash-ryan-withers-vs-ryan-withers/

The Cloud Girls aka Carnovale and Culp –
Past performers at Sydney Cracker, Melbourne Fringe and Adelaide Fringe
festivals, the Cloud Girls are truly unique character based comedians. Taking the
everyday mundane and turning it into great sketched routines, the C and C
laughter factory is going to be one not to miss! For a tiny taster check out
this clip http://www.youtube.com/user/carnovaleandculp#p/a/u/1/3XDCHQJIj60

With ample support coming from the likes of
Rhys Jones, Nick Capper, Dain Hedgpeth, Ray Badran, Rod Todd, John Cruickshank,
Ben Ellwood and more to be announced, expect a hilarious and diverse show from
Sydney’s best alternative comedy collective!

For more information or questions on Stand
Up, Get Down please contact Rhys Jones at [email protected]

Max Cavalera*Tiny snippet of an interview with the Sepultura/Soulfly guitarist that appeared in full in an issue of Live to Ride. (Quite recently, if you’re reading this blurb before I wrote it and put it online…)

My Podcasts

Dedicated comedy showcase featuring live stand-up, interviews, a weekly gig guide and classic comedy clips. Hosted by Dom Romeo and a different guest comedian each week. Some episodes have been transcribed. Show ceased production at the end of 2006, replaced by Stand & Deliver.

Songs of a Misspent Youth

From Beginning To EndThe first real Psychedelic Spew song… originally perpetrated on a Sharp three-in-one hifi stereo system whose pause button was miraculously in perfect alignment with the record and erase heads; that mastertape is long gone. This time round, I [mis]used ProTools.

No Wucken FurriesTheme to a derivative, undergraduate, university sketch comedy show, some of which was actually video taped...